Wednesday, May 31, 2017

A Palestinian chick whitewashes the hatred right out of Palestinian school books--and in the high-toned pages of Time Literary Supplement, no less. Lina Alsaafi slams Israel (of course) for keeping the Palestinians down, and hails the contents of Palestinian school texts for striving to unite "fragmented" Gazans (who live under the thumb of Hamas, a genocial jihadi outfit) and West Bankers (who live under the yoke of Abbas's despotic, Zion-loathing kleptocrats, the PA):

As the first minister of education of the newly formed Palestinian Authority in 1994, [Dr. Naim]Abuhummos was designated the task of creating the first Palestinian curriculum, uniting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank for the first time in decades. The process took ten years and involved 4,000 people. Even after the 2007 Fatah–Hamas split, the curriculum has remained more or less the same. The books are printed in Ramallah and sent to Gaza every year. Historical events in Palestine are “taught as they are”, says Abuhummos – by which he means without the gloss of patriotic rhetoric. The Arab defeat of 1967 is thus taught as exactly that: a defeat. At primary school level, lessons are taught about landmarks in cities across the country – Jerusalem, Nablus, Nazareth, Hebron, Gaza City, etc. National poets, such as Mahmoud Darwish, along with the siblings Ibrahim and Fadwa Touqan, are included, but the works of Ghassan Kanafani, the writer, intellectual and activist for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), are not, despite his being one of the most famous Palestinian literary figures.

We learned about these types of individuals, as well as about various other aspects of Palestinian resistance, from our parents and their personal libraries. Home was where different dialects could be absorbed and used interchangeably, as I eventually learned to do. It was the school away from school, which taught us that, despite the many differences – of accent, geography, cuisine, oppression – between a Palestinian in Haifa, Khan Yunis, Ramallah and Jerusalem, these are also the unifying factors that bind us together under the threat of separation.

In July 2015, PMW prepared a comprehensive report on Palestinian Authority ‎education. It includes chapters on names of schools (dozens named after terrorists), ‎school activities (e.g., visiting homes of terrorists), statements and activities of ‎educators (e.g., presenting murderers as role models and promising a world without ‎Israel), schoolbooks, informal education (children reciting poems on kids' TV programs: ‎e.g., Jews are monkeys and pigs; Tel Aviv is "occupied Palestine"), and a chapter with ‎examples of honoring Hitler.‎

Students attending United Nations-run schools in the West Bank and Gaza use textbooks that ignore the existence of Israel, according to a new report sure to fuel renewed claims about anti-Semitism within the world body.

The schools, which teach mainly Palestinian children, are funded by the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and use texts from the Palestinian Ministry of Education. The books convey the ministry's refusal to recognize Israel, as well as the message that holy sites like the Western Wall and the Cave of the Patriarchs are exclusively Muslim sites, according to the report.

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"It is despicable that a UN agency is teaching Palestinian children racism and lies about Jews and Israel,” Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, an international Israel education organization, told FoxNews.com. “There will be no peace and no justice as long as Palestinian leaders, backed by the UN, continue to deny the history and rights of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland."

Use of the textbooks was discovered after an investigation was completed by Arnon Gross, who translated the books, and Ronni Shaked from the Harry Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem according to Ynet News.

In their translations, the pair discovered that not a single mention is made of the historical connection of Jews to the land of Israel or the city of Jerusalem and that the UNRWA schools also make no mention of Jewish holy sites in their materials. Instead, the textbooks contain learning materials that say that these are all Muslim holy Sites that the Jews are trying to illegitimately control.

Children at the schools are also taught to negate the existence of the Hebrew languages, according to the report. One text has a picture of a stamp used during the British Mandate period which has Hebrew, English and Arabic writing. The image of the stamp in the book has been altered to remove all the Hebrew writing.

The researchers also discovered that maps accompanying the books contain no reference to the presence of Jews in Israel, with all Jewish cities and towns established after 1948 erased. Tel Aviv is even renamed "Tel al-Rabia."

Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, said that the UNRWA is in breach of a recent agreement with the State Department.

One is amused, albeit not in a good way, by the lead letters in today's National Post (they're unavailable online, alas) averring that "Islam rejects violence."That's a lot like saying that Justin Trudeau rejects narcissism. Meaning that in both cases, the word "rejects" would have to be replaced with "embraces" for it to be so.Speaking of things that miss the mark by a longshot, Mark Steyn takes on the pusillanimous unanimity of politicians and media pundits who contend that violent acts of jihad are meant "to sow division," a rupture which we must do our best to resist:

When death stalks the land, make no mistake: He may look like a grim reaper, but he's really a grim sower. An entire sowing bee of experts has so decreed. Indeed, in their warnings about sowing division, our betters are so non-divided that they give off the faintly creepy whiff of fellows all reading off the same cue card helpfully biked round to them by the Central Commissar ten minutes after the "incident" occurred.

You non-experts might think this a fairly crude sleight of hand - that concerns about "division" is a not so subtle way of suggesting that the real problem isn't guys like Salman Abedi waiting with his nail bomb at the exit to the pop concert, but divisive types like you querying whether it's prudent to keep importing more and more Islam into the western world. Well, screw you: if you disagree that the real danger here is the sowing of division, you're just sowing even more division.

Pace The Toronto Star, I'm not sure it is "stating the obvious" to say that Monday's attack was meant to "sow division". What's going on in Britain and Europe occurs because division has already been sown. It was sown by a careless political class that insisted there could be no questioning of a reckless demographic experiment. It is being reaped, as the division-sowing pop star Morrissey has divisively noted, by the political class' hapless citizenry.

The Venn-diagram overlap between the world’s Muslims and the world’s terrorists may be small, but it is not trivial, and the confrontation between the Islamic world and the West puts a cold light on areas of concern beyond political violence. In the Islamic world itself, we see a heritage of high culture and great civilizational achievements, but a great deal of it looks like Karachi at the high end and rural Yemen at the low end: violent, backward, cruel, and uninterested in progress to the extent that “progress” is synonymous with Westernization — which, multiculturalist pieties notwithstanding, it is. Even if you set aside the propensity of certain Muslim fanatics to bomb pizza shops and to name public plazas in celebration of fanatics who bomb pizza shops, there’s still a lot of real life as lived in Afghanistan or Egypt that just isn’t going to fly in Chicago. In places such as Minneapolis, we have done a fairly poor job integrating the relatively small number of Muslim immigrants we already have.

And that is of some intense concern in light of the experiences of the many Western European metropolises that are today home to large and poorly assimilated Muslim minority populations, immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants, a non-trivial number of whom are not especially interested in becoming German, Dutch, Swedish, French, or British. It is from among this population that international terrorist networks are able to recruit their local boots on the ground, maladjusted misfits and losers (for once, the president’s penchant for insults is appropriate) such as Omar Mateen and Salman Abedi and the Tsarnaev brothers. It may very well be the case that 99 out of 100 members of Muslim immigrant communities reject jihadism and Islamic supremacism, but the 100th man is Salman Abedi. If you happened to live in a city that does not have a significant, poorly assimilated Muslim minority population on the Malmö model, would you want one? Why? Maybe there is invidious prejudice in that, but that is not all there is to it.

In the case of many terrorist incidents in the West, immigration and travel to and from Islamist hot spots abroad is a part of the equation: San Bernardino, Manchester, 9/11, Orlando, 7/7. The Trump administration is trying, in its habitually incompetent way, to take that fact into consideration, twice failing to impose travel restrictions that fall well within the president’s statutory powers under U.S. immigration law. If anything, the administration does not go far enough. Anti-terrorism considerations should be a substantial part of our public policy not only where visitors’ visas and the like are concerned, but especially in the matter of immigration. The responsibility of the American government is to the American people, as sympathetic as many of those Syrian refugees might be. We do not seem to have much of a well-developed policy on them at the moment, but the most intelligent and decent one would be seeing to it that they are reasonably well looked after — in Syria, or in one of the bordering countries.

To admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty is too much. Even to suggest such a thing is regarded as offensive by liberal opinion, always ready to take protective umbrage on behalf of those whom it regards as its wards. This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse [by Western observers] to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology, the use of which in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as accurate and as enlightening as an account of a cricket match by a baseball correspondent.

"Protective umbrage"--what a great turn of phrase. Think I'll have to borrow it.

Canadian officials have no plans to raise the country’s terrorism threat level in the wake of a deadly suicide bombing that killed 22 people and injured 59 others at the end of a concert by U.S. singer Ariana Grande at Manchester Arena in northern England on Monday.

The government of British Prime Minister Theresa May raised the UK terror threat level from “severe” to “critical” on Tuesday, the highest level indicating that further attacks may be imminent.

“While we do not comment on specific threats or operations related to national security, we can say that Canadian national security and law enforcement partners monitor all potential threats and have robust measures in place to address them,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said in a statement. “Canada’s threat level remains at medium, and has been unchanged since October, 2014.”

Nevertheless, Goodale urged Canadians to remain vigilant and to report any unusual or suspicious behaviour to their local police.

“Canada is fundamentally a safe and peaceful nation,” Goodale said. “We will take all appropriate action to counter terrorist threats to Canada, its citizens and our way of life.”...

I can't tell you how soundly I sleep at night knowing the Trudeaupians are at the helm. 😟

WASHINGTON -- President Trump reminisced on last weekend's trip to Saudi Arabia in a message today wishing "all Muslims a joyful Ramadan" on "behalf of the American people."

The month of fasting begins tonight and ends June 24, when Muslims begin celebrating Eid al-Fitr.

"During this month of fasting from dawn to dusk, many Muslims in America and around the world will find meaning and inspiration in acts of charity and meditation that strengthen our communities. At its core, the spirit of Ramadan strengthens awareness of our shared obligation to reject violence, to pursue peace, and to give to those in need who are suffering from poverty or conflict," Trump said.

"This year, the holiday begins as the world mourns the innocent victims of barbaric terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and Egypt, acts of depravity that are directly contrary to the spirit of Ramadan. Such acts only steel our resolve to defeat the terrorists and their perverted ideology."

All I can say to that whopping heap of bilge is, "Dream on, Don." Islam's founder himself ordered and presided over the beheading of every adult male member of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe. Barbaric? Sure. And, like the acts of today's jihadis, in no way contrary to "the spirit of Ramadan."

Dude wants us to believe that non-specific "extremism" (and not those specifically heeding the jihad imperative embedded in Islam's core religious texts) is what plagues us:

The FLQ, the KKK, ISIL. They're all the same: terrorists motivated by socio-political goals, not spiritual aspirations. Militants, not men of faith.

So our real enemy, plain and simple, is not Islam, rather it's the extreme-leaning people of all backgrounds. And it's ignorance that breeds them...

Here's the truth of it: Islam's founder was both a militant and a man of faith (who married the two together when he invented the concept of jihad--"holy war"--i.e. sacralized combat). A man motivated both by socio-political goals and by spiritual aspirations. And the jihadis of today, the ones blowing up little girls in Manchester, are inspired to act by his "perfect" example.That being so, our real enemy, plain and simple, is the ignorance of infidels who know nothing about Islam, who therefore presume that it's more or less the same as Judaism and Christianity, and who fall for this fellow's comforting claptrap.

The so-called progressives who denounce Israel are unfazed by the jailing of dissenters in Iran, oblivious to the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, blind to the incarceration and torture of gay men in Qatar, accepting of widespread female genital mutilation and unperturbed by the persecution of Christians in several Islamic countries. Their single fixation is on the Jewish state, a country whose laws treat all citizens equally, regardless of gender or religion and guarantee them education, healthcare and civil liberties. A country where freedom of expression is sacred.

Many progressives are singularly fixed on criticizing the Jewish state, a country that treats all citizens equally and guarantee their civil liberties

It is time to stop kidding ourselves and to call all those with such selective social conscience the anti-Semites we all know they are. Hitler and the Nazis were vanquished but Jew hatred was not. It has found renewed vigour in an unholy partnership between the jihadists and the proverbial useful idiots, who hide under the progressive mantle.

No doubt there were a few progressive-minded Jews in the crowd of over 2,000 who bristled at these words (Wiesenthal being in the "tolerance" business, and attracting some leftists on that basis). But that made hearing them so much more delicious than the meal (which was chicken, a tad dry, in case you were wondering).

The Sharia Department is supervised by Sheikh Salem Sheikhi, who is assisted by his deputy Sheikh Mohammed Saeed. E-mail:

sharia.didsbury@gmail.com

Opening hours of Shari’a Department

Monday to Thursday 10 am to 3 pm, Friday: 2 pm to 3 pm

The most important services provided by the Sharia department include:

Issuing Fatwas

Issues related to the Muslim Family’s affairs in Britain.

Contracts:

Performing marriage contracts and sermons.

Arranging Islamic power of attorney contracts relating to marriages.

Issuing divorce certificates on behalf of the husband.

Issuing Khul’ certificates.

Issuing confirmation of Islam certificates for new Muslims.

Solving family disputes:

Issuing divorce resolutions in the following cases

Domestic abuse from the husband.

Irreconcilable disputes between husband and wife.

Abandonment of the wife by the husband.

Sexual problems.

Issuing Khul’ resolutions by the head of The Sharia Department in cases of the husband’s refusal.

Advice and consultations:

Providing Sharia consultations regarding family disputes.

Providing courses in family relations in Islam.

Other issues regarding general personal affairs:

Providing assistance writing Sharia compliant wills.

Distribution of inheritance according to Sharia.

The calculation of Zakat.

Financial Transactions:

Providing consultation and advice in financial disputes.

Devising commercial contracts compliant with Sharia.

Sharia adjudication in financial disputes.

Mediation between the different sections of the Muslim community in Great Britain.

Intervention to solve and assist with problems regarding child abscondance.

Bear in mind that all this is being offered in a city in England, the land that gave us the Magna Carta and birthed modern notions about freedom and civil rights.One wonders why Abedi bothered to blow up infidels when they're heading in the right direction (so to speak) anyway, and on their own.Update: Prior to taking up residency at 10 Downing Street, Theresa May had nothing but praise for sharia in the UK:

May sparked controversy when she spoke out in support of the Islamic courts operating in the country, telling the nation they could "benefit a great deal" from Sharia teachings.

On the Tucker Carlson show, Mark Steyn lambastes "the official lie" being purveyed by UK leadership (the lie which sees no Islam--no, none at all--in the acts of jihadis who unleash terrorism on unsuspecting infidels; the lie which, for reasons of political correctness, gives Islam a jihadectomy).

Stop being so defensive about asserting Jewish rights. It’s our land and always has been. By agreeing to hand over some of it to the Palestinians as part of a failed peace process, Israelis have in effect endorsed the Palestinian narrative that they are at fault for the conflict, she argues.

The solution, said Glick, in an address last week at Shaarei Shomayim Congregation, is to do what Israel did in Jerusalem and the Golan – apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria, a.k.a., the West Bank.

“This land is ours by history, by international legal rights, and it’s ours by justice, and we have to assert those rights,” she said.

Glick is author of The Israeli Solution; A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. Her position stands in sharp contrast to the one adopted by successive Israeli governments, but she believes Israel’s international standing was stronger, not weaker, when it stood up to international pressure.

Israelis thought that by yielding its rights and turning over territory, it would foster international goodwill and enhance its diplomatic cachet. Instead, the opposite has occurred.

If Israel wants international respect, it has to assert its rights, she said. If Israel wants to tell advocates of boycotts, divestments and sanctions where to stick their positions, it has to be assertive.

“You can’t do it if all you say is we want defensible borders” and if you agree that the other side, which “exists only to destroy you,” has rights.

A great question that's explored in depth here.Update: By coincidence, a woman who obviously doesn't read Tabletemailed Mark Steyn to assign blame for the Manchester terrorism:

The killer was the queen of England's clan.

Rothschild Soros club.

Stop zionist Israel jews from manufacturing all this illusion. They are the banking cartel around the world. Stop blaming everyone but the culprits, themselves. Or we will have no respect for journalists and the tales they put out.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Mark Steyn's piece on last night's feat of jihad in Manchester and the ramifications thereof deserves to be read in its entirety. To whet your appetite, here's one particularly tasty bit (my bolds):

I am currently reading Douglas Murray's fine book, The Strange Death of Europe, which lays out, unsparingly, the central illusion of the last half-century - that you could demographically transform the composition of hitherto more or less homogeneous nation states on a scale no stable society has ever attempted, and that there would be no consequences except a more vibrant range of local restaurants. Mrs May declared this morning on the steps of Downing Street that she had held a top-level security meeting, or what they call in Britain a "COBRA", which sounds like something scary enough to do battle with SPECTRE; in that sense, it's a very butch acronym for a bit of bureaucratic furniture labeling (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A). But I'll bet the mood around the table was one of fatalism and resignation, outside a few micro-adjustments to the budget of counter-terrorism agencies and the number of CCTV cameras and the amount of security checks at "sensitive" "high-value" targets like department stores, and theatres, and restaurants and football grounds and pubs and chip shops and...

But the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism. Yet the subject of immigration has been all but entirely absent from the current UK election campaign. Thirty years ago, in the interests of stopping IRA terrorism, the British state was not above preventing the internal movement within its borders of unconvicted, uncharged, unarrested Republican sympathizers seeking to take a ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. Today it declares it can do nothing to prevent the movement of large numbers of the Muslim world from thousands of miles away to the heart of the United Kingdom. It's just a fact of life - like being blown up when you go to a pop concert.

All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.

"Defiance chic"--good one, Mark.Update: The Brits comfort themselves with platitudes such as this one."Love in the end is always stronger than hate"?Not so. For instance, "love" wasn't stronger than the Nazis, and, on its own, would not have defeated them.Also--Israel exists today because fifty years ago, Jews fought and defeated Arabs during a six day-long war. The idea that the Israelis' "love" could have prevailed over their enemies' hatred is as specious as it is insane.

These deep thinkers want to do away with the "obsession" (the pejorative they use to describe a natural human desire, at least in these parts) so that people will be willing to live sans grumble in rental units (which have yet to be built).It seems that, for those of a certain bent (you know the kind), private property remains anathema.

Instead of blaming the "obsession" and those who manifest it, surely these "experts" should point to the obvious--an insufficient supply along with all the speculators, bidding wars and house flippers.

There are those who will tell you that Trump's speech in the Magic Kingdom shows that he "gets" the jihad.Don't believe 'em.Oh sure, Trump's speech in Riyadh is a quantum improvement over Obama's groveling suckuppery in Cairo. But when the bar is set that low--mere centimeters above the ground--there is nowhere to go but up.How do we know that Trump is still some ways away from comprehending the religious dogma that fuels the eternal Holy War (eternal, that is, until Islam finally prevails)?Ask yourself this: would someone who was clued in to the reality that the leaders he praises so effusively fund "extremist" mosques and madrassahs in the West and around the world (the better to spread Islam and keep the "extremists" from blowing up the Saudis, the corrupt custodians of the two holy mosques) collaborate with these selfsame funders on a Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, and situate the thing in Saudi Arabia?Sorry, but that's just plain nuts.It would be helpful if someone could explain to this president that there are two vicious and competing strands of Islam--the Saudis' and the Khomeinists'--and that one is no better than the other.Update:Andrew McCarthy thinks that Trump's strategy of "Principled Realism" isn't nearly principled or realistic enough:

The principal fiction in “principled realism” is that we share “common values” with Sunni Arab sharia societies. That is problematic because these purported “common values” — in conjunction with “shared interests” — are said to be the roots of Trump’s approach.

The president stressed that during his first overseas trip as president, he would be “visiting many of the holiest places in the three Abrahamic faiths.” The irony was palpable, at least to some of us. Trump is not visiting the holiest places of Islam.

Yes, upon departing Saudi Arabia, he headed to Israel where he prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In the offing is a jaunt to Rome, to the Vatican for an audience with Pope Francis. But for all the treacle about “why I chose to make my first foreign visit a trip to the heart of the Muslim world, to the nation [Saudi Arabia] that serves as custodian of the two holiest sites in the Islamic faith,” Trump sidestepped the fact that he is not welcome in those two sites, Mecca and Medina.

Why? Because the president is a non-Muslim. Non-Muslims are not allowed to step their infidel feet in Islam’s sacred cities.

That iteration of Islamic intolerance is squarely based on scripture — see, e.g., the Koran’s Sura 9:28: “Oh you who believe! Truly the idolaters are unclean, so let them not, after this year, approach the sacred mosque” — a verse that specifically relates to the Grand Mosque in Mecca (Makkah), and has been extended by Islamic scholars to Medina. That is why Trump’s House of Saud hosts enforce a ban on entry by non-Muslims to both cities.

Peace between Israel and the Palestinians always seems “so close” – but remains elusive. And similar to [Robert] McNamara, the fault is not with the other side; instead it is the Left’s mistaken understanding of the Palestinians.

Anyone think for even a nanosecond that Trump's understanding is any better?Update: Something that Marwan Barghouthi ("the Palestinian Nelson Mandela," so-called) gets right--he says "the last day of the occupation will be the first day of peace."To translate from the Islamist: the last day of the occupation (of Israel, all of it, by the Jews) will be the first day of peace (in the Islamist sense of the word, i.e. the "peace" that will be in effect once Islam takes over permanently).Update: Abbas's children will ensure that any "peace" deal will not benefit the Jews.

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

I'm glad that, after many years, they're finally getting around to creating the thing, but the winning design is as bizarre as it is perplexing, and fails to capture the horror and the victims' suffering.One wonders: if that's the winner, how awful were the losers?

I live in a city which has vast temperature variations; where it can be blisteringly hot and humid in the summer, and bone-chillingly cold in the winter.A climate such as this is apt to use plenty of energy to cope with it all.And yet, there are those who beseech us lay off the air conditioning when it gets hot as blazes (for the sake of "saving" the planet, of course).Isn't that every bit as nutty as telling us to turn off the heat during a winter deep freeze?

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Somewhat amusingly, the headline above three letters printed in today's National Post re the Jonathan Kay kerfuffle is "Cultural appropriation debate". Debate? What debate? For 'tis clear that in Justin's "progressive" Trudeaupia there is plenty of "diversity" (of provenance), but "debating," as such, is in short and rapidly diminishing supply.After all, a "debate" might hurt someone's precious feelings.A chap from Ottawa with an impressive double-barreled name (who wrote one of the letters) offers up a guilt-inducing history lesson to underscore how insensitive it is to engage in "debate"/"free speech" when a victim groups' feelings are involved. Writes Colin Blair Meyer-Macaulay:

The problem with Jonathan Kay's free speech approach to cultural appropriation is that speech is only free to those doing the oppressing. Fifty years ago it was illegal in Canada for indigenous people to openly practice their own culture. Thousands of children were kidnapped from their homes by the federal government to protect them from indigenous culture. Native Canadians continue to be marginalized and face overwhelming racism in education, employment, health care and criminal justice.

And now some white kids are upset because they got called out for wearing head dresses and war paint at cultural festivals and Caucasian writers and artists are facing a backlash for appropriating Native Canadian stories and art, even in some high-profile cases stealing native identities.

To marginalize an entire ethnic group for three centuries and then profit off their culture is not a policy item for debate. It is indefensible under any circumstances. That you only appreciate its importance when oppressed individuals formulate their arguments in concrete terms about the way it affects Native Canadians that you can understand (such as not being able to get their pain medicine) does not make you rational. It makes you a special kind of dense.

Take that, all you "dense"-heads!Here's the letter I wrote in response:

Letter-writer Colin Blair Meyer-Macaulay says "the problem with Jonathan Kay's free speech approach to cultural appropriation is that speech is only free to those doing the oppressing."

How right he is! Only, in our time, the oppression is being conducted by humourless "progressives" who venerate victimhood and who clutch their pearls and reach for the smelling salts when, on those rare occasions, someone has the temerity to stray from the one acceptable, CBC-approved opinion on any given subject.

Thus does political correctness claim its latest two casualties--Hal Niedzvieki and Jonathan Kay. And you can be sure that what's happened to them will serve as a cautionary tale for others who toil in Canada's grim cultural precincts to squelch any ideas or expression that are at odds with the "progressive" script.

Many cultures do not. Those cultures treat women as the property of either their father or husband.

Many men in these cultures believe a woman should be killed if she goes against any of their backward, ignorant rules for how a woman is allowed to behave.

My culture educates both boys and girls, and women rise to powerful positions in business, science, the arts and politics.

My culture believes in civil rights.

It believes in protecting individual freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations and powerful, private individuals.

Those rights include freedom of speech and of the press. ...

My culture, however, exists in the real world, made up of millions of human beings, so it is far from perfect. ...

Exactly. Which is why "progressives" despise it. (Thomas Sowell explains it like this: "progressives" have a "vision of the anointed." They long to perfect the world and transform it into a "social justice" utopia. The Jerrys of the world, on the other hand, have a "tragic vision," meaning that they know that the human condition is fraught with travail and pain that cannot be ameliorated via central planning. They also know that the end result of utopian scheming is a totalitarian horror show.)

Monday, May 15, 2017

In a bitter diplomatic incident, a senior member of the US delegation making preparations for Donald Trump’s visit to Israel next week angrily rejected a request that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompany the president when he visits the Western Wall, and then sniped at his Israeli counterparts that the Western Wall is “not your territory. It’s part of the West Bank,” Israeli television reported on Monday night.

An official at the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed the report, telling the Times of Israel that Israeli officials were “shocked” by the comments and have asked the Trump administration about the incident.

The official said that Netanyahu is certain that the comment does not reflect President Trump’s policy...

Dinner was served. Trump got a different, more colorful salad dressing than theirs. His chicken had extra sauce on the side. With his pie came a double helping of vanilla. With theirs, a single. By [TIME] magazine’s account, there was no explanation. None was needed. He’s the president and you’re not.

Sorry, but I find Trump's imperiousness to be no more endearing than (and every bit as unpalatable as) Obama's.

Kay has resigned as editor of insufferable/unreadable Canadian periodical, The Walrus. He did so, clearly, to stave off the indignity of being fired. His "crime": he dared to diverge from acceptable leftoid thinking on the subject of "cultural appropriation."You can read all about the "controversy" (or what passes for controversy in Canada's Stalinistic "progressive" cultural corridors) here.Meanwhile, Kay, a former conservative who tried to move leftward for the sake of his career (hey, a guy has to feed his kids, right?) admits that, when your heart and soul aren't entirely in it, changing your worldview is really hard to do--and exacts way too high a price:

“From the beginning, it was obvious that it was going to be difficult for me to balance my instincts as a National Post-bred opinion writer with the more staid responsibilities associated with the leadership of a respected media brand,” Kay wrote in an email. “In recent months especially, I have been censoring myself more and more, and my colleagues have sometimes been rightly upset by disruptions caused by my media appearances.

“Something had to give, and I decided to make the first move. I took no severance.”

However, he did leave with some semblance of backbone, which, in the long run, is going to be worth a lot more.Update: Don't miss Mark Steyn's take on the matter.

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About Me

Scaramouche is my nom de Web. My real name is Mindy G. Alter, and I like to think of myself as a free speecher with a sense of humour. My bailiwick: fighting on behalf of all the good things that free speech helps safeguard, and doing my utmost to highlight the malevolence and imbicilities of those who oppose freedom, whomever they may be.